


I Will Possess Your Heart

by starmirror



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Incest, Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-16
Updated: 2015-03-16
Packaged: 2018-03-18 01:16:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3550673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starmirror/pseuds/starmirror
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jupiter and Balem play a game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Will Possess Your Heart

**Author's Note:**

> This work contains dub-con in which one party is a prisoner.

                Jupiter did not know how long she had been held prisoner. Space was timeless and the days and nights blurred together in a field of incalculable stars, neither rising nor setting. They spun slowly through an endless twilight of purple nebulas and the distant glimmer of a million suns. She wondered how many planets she could see from Balem’s ship and how many of those he owned—how many were populated by billions of human unaware of their approaching doom.

                Maybe Balem preferred to live this way, without the gentle touch of daylight or the soft illumination of the moon, because it did not remind him of how long he had been alive. Jupiter did not know how or when Balem came to be but she did know that he was much older than Kalique or Titus. The other Abrasax siblings had retained a sense of humanity that Balem had lost, forgotten eons ago as his life stretched beyond that of the stars themselves.

                He was truly alien and she could not fathom his intentions.

                Jupiter had not seen him since he had walked into her house on Earth and told her that she if she cooperated, her family would remain unharmed. That was not really him, just a projection—an illusion, like so much of his world. The Abrasax all lived in a space between illusion and reality. He had vanished like a ghost and Mr. Night had brought her to the empty, gilded halls of the ship he called _The Zaralexa_.

                “This is like his house?” Jupiter had asked. She knew that Titus lived aboard his ship, while Kalique lived on a planet she presumably owned.

                “It is one of many ships in My Lord’s fleet. It is the smallest and for his personal uses,” Mr. Night had said. It did not seem small—it seemed impossibly large to Jupiter. She walked for hours every day and could not find any end or beginning, only more windows and more planets in an endless death march.

                The ship had no crew that she could see. The only person who came or went was Mr. Night, who would have short aimless conversations about her wellbeing and leave again. He had directed her to two rooms when she first arrived. One was a massive, rectangular bedroom. There was a bed and an expanse of windows with no curtains or closures and a closet with an array of black tunics and soft leggings. They were uniform, institutional clothes. Nothing like what Kalique or Titus had dressed her in.

                Attached to the bedroom was sitting room with an array of low brocaded couches. The ceiling stretched between them, so high that Jupiter could not see its arches. It faded into shadows and nothingness. There were no doors at all in the ship. A thin divider that looked like paper but felt like glass separated a bathing area from the bedroom.

                One wall of the sitting room was inset with hundreds of drawers like a mausoleum. On closer inspection, Jupiter realized that each drawer was divided into twenty sheaves with square handles. They each emitted a pale blue light and could be rotated out of their place in the wall. It was nothing more than an elaborate bookshelf.

                When she was bored of exploring the ship, Jupiter would read. Most of the sheaves in the left-most column were records, lists of coded numbers, locations, and funds. She abandoned those quickly. The center columns were filled with historical information, which she skimmed for any clues about her past life.

                The right-most column had two entire drawers dedicated to rules and strategy of chess. Jupiter’s mother had taught her how to play, as her mother had taught her before. Jupiter had excelled and handily beaten all of her family members and classmates by the age of twelve.The games described in the sheaves were a variation on Earth chess, although the pieces and their motions remained similar.

                For a while Jupiter continued to read them and absorb the information. Mr. Night’s visits became more infrequent—or maybe the days seemed longer—and Jupiter became restless. Caine was in prison, as Titus had said, or he was dead, as she suspected. The Aegis would never be able to find her again. As far as they knew, she was happily returned to her existence on Earth. Or perhaps they knew the truth and Balem had simply purchased her fate, the way he purchased the fates of so many other people.

                Chess began to weigh on her mind. She craved to play, to forget her loneliness. There were no boards that she could find on the ship. In fact, there seemed to be few non-essential items at all. Most of the rooms on board were unfurnished and looked like empty cathedrals with tireless golden figures upholding the vastness of space above them. Jupiter chose the room closest to her quarters—she hesitated to call the bedroom that—and decided to build a board from scratch.

                She had slept three times since Mr. Night’s last visit. Perhaps he was otherwise engaged, off imprisoning other people on Balem’s orders. Still, Jupiter thought it was safe to begin her project. What would Night do about it anyway if he discovered her?

                There were several candidates for the pieces. In the bathroom, she found an entire box of bars of soap. They were flat and pliable and would serve well as pawns.

Twice every day, she was delivered a meal on a tray. It would appear in her sitting room when she was not there and be waiting when she returned. There was always a glass of what looked like water but did not taste quite right. Jupiter assumed that this was something to do with filtration and did not allow herself to dwell on it. She was also given a knife and fork to eat a plate of something green and a bowl of a rice-like grain. After some consideration, she began to stash away the plates and utensils under the bed.

 It took six meals to accumulate enough of them. She worried whoever was making the food might be angry—or worse, tell Mr. Night—about her little project, but when the seventh meal arrived as per usual she allowed herself to sigh with relief. She sent the plate setting back intact and nothing unusual happened.

                Then there was the problem of the board itself. She had no way to mark the lines or pieces, since pens were obsolete. She did have her sheets. The bed was layered with five coverings of various thickness, but in the temperature controlled spaceship Jupiter did not need them. She chose the thinnest one and ripped it carefully into squares, which she laid out on the floor in a checkered pattern. She tore the extra sheet into thin strips and tied them in petite bows on half the makeshift pieces. Her set was complete.

                She arranged them carefully, following the instruction of the introductory sheave.

                The right side up glass was her queen, the upside down glass was her king. The soap were arranged as the pawns. The knives were knights and the forks were rooks. The bowls were bishops.

                The sheaves had other names for the pieces, although they were in an older language than English and Jupiter could not say them aloud.

                The first game took her two sleeps to complete. She played against herself, crouching over the board with the pieces in one hand and a sheave of introductory strategy in the other. It took three more games before she felt comfortable enough to consult the next sheave. Jupiter had a gift for calculating potentials, however, and she rapidly began to test more advanced movements. Her loneliness seemed less crushing when her days were spent on the board.

                She did not have to look out at the emptiness of space, wonder at the magnitude of death or the infinite hopelessness of her confinement. She could look down at the game.

                When Balem finally arrived, Jupiter hardly noticed.

                The white rook was poised to take the black rook, the pawns already dispatched. The white king was gone, but the black king was in motion and the remaining white bishop was cornered. Jupiter was kneeling in the center of the board, pondering her next move.

                “What are you doing?” he asked. She had assumed his voice had been distorted in his projection, but it sounded as whispery in person. He was wearing a long black cloak, embroidered with golden thread. It swept behind him, heavy but fluid, folding easily and rippling like water. Balem moved like that too.

                “Playing chess,” Jupiter said. “I was bored. I’ve been here forever.”

                Balem was difficult to read, but he seemed genuinely surprised and curious. Perhaps time no longer had any meaning to him and he did not realize that she had been trapped for weeks.

                “How did you learn this game?”

                “The sheaves from the wall,” Jupiter said. She felt surprisingly patient, considering she had waited for so long. “Are you finally going to explain why I’m here? Or am I going to stay here until I die?”

                Balem retracted his pretense of cordiality. He was ever-shifting, inscrutable. Jupiter was mildly terrified. “You can abdicate. Return to your home,” he said.

                “Then you would harvest the Earth.”

                “The time is not upon us. You would not see it.”

                “I don’t matter,” Jupiter snapped. Her patience evaporated. “I would rather waste away and die a prisoner than sacrifice an entire planet.”

                Balem was affronted. He stepped closer and his foot nudged the black bishop out of place. “Then you are a fool. And you will die.”

                “Fine! But you can’t touch the Earth, even if I do. The Aegis will find me eventually. Did you know that it is against the law to detain an entitled?”

                “You should be grateful that I let you live!”

                “You can’t kill me,” Jupiter said. “I’m done with you people. You think I’m just like her, that I’m going to be swayed by your crazy bullshit about immortality. You all think that you can have her back. Well, I’m not your goddamn mother, but if you keep believing that I am, you can watch her die a second time.”

                Balem was enraged and for a moment, Jupiter thought he would really kill her. But his hand did not close around her throat. It brushed along her jaw, so delicately that she might have imagined it. He left with a great flourish of his cloak, knocking over the rest of the pieces.

                She did not see anyone for long time after that. It was difficult to tell how many hours had passed or how much time she had spent recreating the various notable games described in the fifth sheave. It was during the Seventh Championship of Doreckar that she was interrupted again, poised to lose against the champion’s winning blow.

Mr. Night arrived with a package wrapped in black paper. It was the first time he had brought her anything. The package was a case, which unfolded into a chess set. The pieces were carved out of a smooth, light-weight stone and the opposing pieces were inset with gold, as were their matching squares. They vaguely resembled the pieces she knew on Earth, enough that she could place them in their correct positions.

                “Thank you,” she said.

                “It is a gift from My Lord,” Mr. Night replied smoothly. “I trust we can fix the mess in the receiving room now.”

                “Sure,” she agreed absently. Her mind was preoccupied by the pieces—and the possibilities. Jupiter was immune to his passive aggressive barbs. Mr. Night left without his usual inquiries about her health. She was both awed by and suspicious of the gift and she allowed it to sit unused on the table. It called out to her from her bed, glittering gently under the ambient light.

                When she had finished reading all of the sheaves from the sitting room, she felt brave enough to play on the real board. Her makeshift game had long ago disappeared while she was sleeping, probably taken by the same person who delivered her food. She picked up a pawn and before she could make her first move Balem appeared a second time.

                His clothes were not as heavy, but cut from as fine a cloth as before. A new collar gleamed under his chin, the same colour as his hair. Jupiter stared at him, but he did not greet her. She had wondered why he had sent the chess set. There were two possible conclusions: first, that he wanted her to be comfortable and happy. Jupiter knew that was not true. So, the second possibility was that Balem also played. To what end, she did not know, but Jupiter could do that. She could play the game.

                “One game,” Jupiter demanded. She gestured to the newly arranged chess pieces. “If I win, you release me. You will never touch me or my family again.”

                Balem seemed amenable, but she could never be sure what he was really thinking. He sat across from her on the other couch. “What will I get if I win?”

                “Another game,” Jupiter said.

                He agreed and they began. The pieces could act out a war, but Jupiter felt a small sense of security with the board set between them. She was not so foolish as to believe Balem was not dangerous, or that he had forgotten about the Earth.

                Her opening move was quickly countered, but she moved forward anyway.

                Jupiter knew that Balem was watching her. She could feel him observing her expressions while she considered her move on the board. She had no opportunity to analyze him, because Balem made his choice instantly every time. Jupiter felt her heart sinking as he predicted her actions and easily avoided her attacks—clearly there was nothing she had read in the sheaves that he had not already seen. He aggressively crushed her initial attempts at strategy and decimated her players in only eight moves.

                “Would you like to forfeit?” Balem rasped.

                “No,” Jupiter said. She still had her queen, her bishop, and two pawns in action. All was not lost, Jupiter promised herself. She shifted one of her pawns forward.

                It was lost, though. He defeated her easily.

                “I guess I owe you another game,” she said.

                “Yes. Another game.”

                Jupiter was not ready to give up. Balem knew everything she could study about strategies and games and he had thousands of years of practice and opponents that she did not have. However, Balem was used to certain etiquette. It was simply a matter of becoming creative and surprising him and victory would be hers.

                He would appear in her room and they would play and she would lose. It became something of a routine, although Jupiter knew that the time between his visits was irregular. Sometimes she would pay herself, practicing strategies until she felt she had tried every possible count-move. Other times Balem would return in what seemed like only a few hours. She began to see fragments of his life, distilled by distance and time. He would show up in gilded robes or in plain black clothing not much different from hers. Little threads of humanity began to peak through: tiredness when he arrived, eagerness to play, smugness when he won.

                They spoke infrequently. He was not a talented conversationalist and Jupiter wanted to concentrate. Sometimes he would let slip a dry remark about her latest move, or he would correct her Earth names.

                “Checkmate,” Jupiter sighed and she collected her pieces again. Balem only stared at her. “It means I lost. My king can’t escape.”

                “It had a true name, before your planet was seeded: _nahimairr_ ,” he said. Jupiter could not hope to imitate the sounds in the right order. It was different from any language she had ever heard on Earth. She smiled weakly instead and re-set the board.

                It was after many games that Jupiter finally surprised Balem. He made a misstep when he sacrificed his queen and she pounced, her own queen still in play and two bishops. She was elated as she snatched his king from the board. The key to her freedom was finally in her hand. But when she looked up at Balem, he was completely indifferent.

                “You did not think I would release you over a game?” he asked.

                “You promised me,” Jupiter said. She was coiled up with fury, unable to contain herself anymore. It felt as though she had played hundreds and hundreds of games, sleepless with the sickening hope that she could save her family.

                “The Earth belongs to me,” Balem replied, as if that was some resolution between them.

                “The Aegis must have discovered this by now. Captain Singh would never let you—”

                “They believe you are dead. As does your family. How long do you think you’ve been away from them, Jupiter? How many days have passed on your precious world?”

                “What do you want from me?” Jupiter screamed at him. She was half-mad from the weight of her loneliness, pressing on her constantly, holding her down. There was no one left in the universe except Balem, as far as she knew. Maybe the sun had collapsed and everything she had ever known was gone. “Why are you keeping me alive? It doesn’t matter. You will never touch the Earth. There is _nothing_ I can give you.”

                Balem inhaled sharply and Jupiter knew. She knew that his patience with the chess games was not out of obligation and that he never intended to keep his side of the deal. He had begun to see through the shadows of the past as Jupiter had calculated move after move on the board and he wanted what he saw there.

                There was a new and terrifying clarity with this revelation. Jupiter wanted to touch him. She had not touched another person in so long that she was unsure if she was still alive or if Balem was real. He was strangely beautiful, suddenly, in a way she had not seen before. She was magnetized, drawing closer and closer, and inevitably her fingertips connected with his skin.

                “You’re alive,” she said. She could feel the pulse on the inside of his wrist, where his sleeves fell away. He was wearing a black over-shirt and yet another metal collar, this one inset with silver, so that only his hands and his face were exposed. She let her fingers trail over the back of his hands, then the arch of his cheekbones. Balem was frozen.

                They had been playing a different game all along, one in which Balem was hopelessly besieged. Jupiter let her lips brush along his in a tantalizing imitation of a kiss.

                “Checkmate,” she said.

                He kissed her and one hand grasped her hair while the other held her up by the waist. Her heels lifted off the floor and then she was not standing on her own at all. Balem was much stronger than he looked, far stronger than logic and reason suggested he could be. It was a sharp reminder that he was not quite human—not in the way that she was—but Jupiter was consumed by a haze of ecstatic desire.

                Motions and senses began to blur together. She was clawing at his clothes when he threw her backwards onto the bed. Jupiter felt the air leave her lungs, but she caught Balem’s wrists and pulled him down toward her. She slid to the edge of the mattress and hooked her legs around him, keeping him in place while she undid the clasp on his collar. It undid all at once with an audible snap. Jupiter pulled it forward and dropped it on the bed.

                Balem slid her tunic over her head and then they were kissing again, but less softly. Teeth scraped across her lips. She needed him to undress. His over-shirt came undone eventually and she tore it out of her way. She pulled backward, disentangling their limbs and peeling off her leggings. She wore nothing under her clothes, since nothing had ever been provided. She sat up so that they were nearly eye to eye.

                “Take off your clothes,” she demanded.

He did not argue with her, although she almost expected him to do so. Jupiter let out a contented noise as skin finally met skin—alive and human and warm. With Balem pressed against her, she dragged her teeth along the inside of his wrist. He bit her neck so hard she felt blood well up under his tongue, but he did not give her an opportunity to taste it. He smeared it across her chest as he moved downward, leaving a wake of bruises on her breasts, the top of her ribs, the space above her hip bone.

                His teeth closed on her inner thigh and Jupiter’s finger tips lost their grip on his shoulders. She could feel the tiny vessels breaking under the skin and hot blood rushing so close to the surface. It was gloriously painful and every mark throbbed with a dull tenderness. His tongue was no gentler. Jupiter felt the ebb and flow of release, brewing since the first bite, rushing waves of electric pleasure as he slipped one then two fingers inside of her.

                Jupiter pulled him up by his hair. She kissed him and licked the blood off his bottom lip. Balem bit down on the other side of her neck and Jupiter rolled them over, so that she could kneel over him. Her thighs pressed on his hips and she held his hands down on the mattress as she sank down. Jupiter did not hesitate. He was inside of her in one smooth motion and she was possessed by the pressure and the pain and the ache for more.

                Torturing Balem was more beautiful than any physical pleasure, so Jupiter moved slowly. She brought him close and then drew back again and again, drops of blood from her shoulder meandering down between her breasts. His nails dug into her hips but she would not be swayed. She was growing tense, closer and closer to the satisfaction of watching him beg her for release.

                “Ask me,” Jupiter ordered. Balem half-snarled at her and she pulled away completely, shifting her weight forward onto his hips so that he could not sit up. She bent down until they were face to face. “I will give you want you want, if you ask me nicely.”

                “Please,” he whispered.

                Jupiter kissed him and then again, to the left, drifting languidly down his neck. He slid his hands under her thighs and flipped her on to her back. Jupiter sucked hard enough to make blood bloom in little roses under his skin. Balem was inside her again and she scraped her nails across his back. It was all heat and contact and Jupiter brought her legs up to force him even closer. She could hear herself getting louder and louder, but he did not say her name.

                In the throes of her second orgasm, she felt Balem achieve his own release. He kissed her and she caught his bottom lip between her teeth. It was hard to breathe. She watched him retreat in a haze of exhaustion and she fell into a dreamless sleep.

                They were not entwined when she woke up. Instead they lay back to front, but a hands-breadth apart, barely close enough to feel body heat radiating between them. Jupiter was facing the window. Instead of the sunrise she looked out over the universe, indigo and molten, flickering like candlelight. The nebulous scenery appeared to slowly spin around them, but really they were spinning on an infinite path through time and space. Jupiter searched for familiar markers: the constellations she had nick-named, the notably red suns. Nothing was the same.

                “How long have I been asleep?” she asked. She could feel that Balem was awake, although he had not moved and his breaths were soft and slow against her back.

                “Fifteen hours, on Earth.”

                Dread was cold and ice filled Jupiter’s veins. It pooled in her chest, in the place her heart used to be. She rolled on to her back so she could not see the window. Above them was only darkness. “And how long have I been here?”

                “Seventy-three years,” Balem said.

                It had to be a dream, Jupiter thought to herself. Caine’s voice echoed in her mind, still as fresh as if she had seen him a week ago. _Most people say it is a dream_.

                “No,” she said. It was all she could say. Balem’s hand brushed through her hair.

                “Jupiter Jones is dead, now. As far as anyone knows.”

                Jupiter ran her left hand up her right arm, feeling the unchanged skin. Her hair had not greyed. She felt as though she had just turned twenty-five. She did not remember how many times she had slept or eaten or bathed, because she knew neither day nor night. But she was sure that it had not been three quarters of a century since she had left Earth.

                “I am still alive,” she said, half to reassure herself and half to prove him wrong. She was not ninety-nine years old. Her body felt, her mind was clear. Her memories of her family were only weeks old.

                “One does not have to bathe in Regenex to feel its effects. You have eaten our food, you drank our water. You _belong_ here now,” Balem said solemnly. His eyes burned into her, although she did not dare look. “A true Abrasax.”

                He traced the bruises he had left, tiny purple galaxies imprinted on her. It stung where the skin had broken. Jupiter hissed but Balem did not retract his hands. She had been consuming the nectar with every meal, slowly imbibing hundreds if not thousands of lives. She expected to feel revulsion but she did not. There was only a cold and empty reality on a cold and empty ship. Balem was closer enough that she could feel his heartbeat.

                “Is everyone in my family dead?” she asked.

                “The ones you knew. But the Earth remains… as it always has.”

                Jupiter finally turned to look at him. She saw the truth in his eyes: he had never wanted the Earth. It was about her, as it always had been. They would live until all the suns had gone cold and drifted so far from each other that the planets became barren, rocky debris. Or they would survive to see the universe consume itself in a singularity that would destroy all matter.

                Perhaps it was fate. Perhaps there were machinations that neither she nor Balem could imagine in the universe, drawing people together in lifetime after lifetime. Or perhaps, it was the coup de grace in the game they had been playing.

                Jupiter moved closer, bracing her arm on the bed. Balem was close to kissing her but she turned her head. The Earth was still spinning, just as she remembered it.

                “Get on your knees,” she ordered him. “And make me forget.”


End file.
